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Curated SQL Posts

Writing a Python Language Extension for ML Services

Published 2021-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Niels Berglund shows how you can bring your own Python 3.9 runtime to SQL Server Machine Learning Services:

When I wrote we’d look at it in a future post I thought to myself; “how hard can it be?”. I had read the steps of how to build a Python language extension for Windows here, and it didn’t seem that hard: some Boost, CMake, compile, and Bob’s your uncle! Well, it turned out it was somewhat more complicated than what I anticipated. So, if you are interested – read on!

I was going to say that the steps seem a bit complicated but not overly terrible, though Niels’s conclusion leaves me wondering.

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Performance Impact of Foreign Keys with Non-Default ON UPDATE or ON DELETE

Published 2021-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis continues a dive into foreign keys:

Welcome to part fifteen of the plansplaining series. In the three previous parts I looked at the operators and properties in an execution plan that check a modification doesn’t violate foreign key constraints. That part is done. But I’m not done with foreign keys yet.

We normally expect foreign keys to throw an error on violations. But that’s actually only the default option: they can also be set to be self-correcting. This is done using the ON UPDATE and ON DELETE clauses, which provide the user with several choices on how to handle child data that would become orphaned, and hence violate the constraint, as a result of a change in the parent table.

Read on to see how these operate in SQL Server.

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Contrasting Data Warehouses with Power BI Dataflows

Published 2021-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad makes a comparison:

Dataflow is the data transformation service in Power BI, and also some other Power Platform services. Data Warehouse is the cloud storage and also compute engine for data. I often get this question that: “Now that we have dataflow in Power BI, should we not use the Data warehouse? What are the differences? which is better? When to use what?” This article and video, explains answer to these questions.

I’m probably a bit lower on self-service BI compared to others. When I see something like Dataflows, it reminds me too much of a mess of Excel spreadsheets on shared drives. There’s a lot of relevant business knowledge embedded in those disbursed locations, and bringing it together becomes as much a forensic exercise as it is architectural.

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Don’t Fear the tempdb

Published 2021-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling puts his pants on one leg at a time and once his pants are on, he makes gold records:

One persistent idea is that tempdb is something to be avoided. Either because it was “slow” or to avoid contention.

Granted, if a query has been around long enough, these may have been valid concerns at some point. In general though, temp tables (the # kind, not the @ kind) can be quite useful when query tuning.

Erik is absolutely right in this post. Ceteris paribus I’d rather not directly use tempdb because I’d prefer one query over multiple queries. But once performance comes into question, working on smaller subsets of data one step at a time will typically give you at least an acceptable solution.

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Deploying ADS Database Projects Manually

Published 2021-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Elizabeth Noble continues a series of videos on database projects in Azure Data Studio:

This week, we’ll talk about one of the easier ways to deploy your database changes. One of the benefits of database projects is that they can generate data-tier applications (DAC). The data-tier applications can be bundled into what is called a DACPAC. This is a collection of files that can be used to deploy your database.

Click through for the video.

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Cross-Validation in Azure ML Studio

Published 2021-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Dinesh Asanka takes us through the cross-validation component in Azure ML Studio:

Let us look at implementing Cross-Validation in Azure Machine Learning. Let us use the sample Adventure Works database that we used for all the articles.

Then Cross Validate Model is dragged and dropped to the experiment. The Cross Validate model has two inputs and two outputs. Two inputs are data input and the relation to the Machine Learning technique. Let us use the Two-Class Decision Jungle as the Machine Learning Technique. Then the first output is connected to the Evaluate Model as shown in the following figure:

Click through for the process.

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Adjusting Database Settings with Powershell

Published 2021-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Eric Cobb takes a look at some nice functionality in dbatools:

There may be times that you want to ensure certain settings are applied to a database, or multiple databases. For example, if you restore a Production database to a QA environment, you may need to change the Recovery Model. Or if you’re migrating databases to a new SQL Server version you want to make sure to update the Compatibility Level. With dbatools this is really, really easy. Here are some examples:

Read on for examples around setting the database owner, changing the compatibility level, and setting the recovery model.

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